For the first edition of the Internet Pavilion, Manetas and Aman, decide to invite a number of people involved with the activist website ThePirateBay.org to come in Venice and inaugurate the Embassy of Piracy. But just a few hours after the press statement of PadiglioneInternet was released, the administration of the Venice Biennial start receiving calls from the Berlusconi government asking them to cancel the invitation of ThePirateBay.

"We are Pirates of the Internet
Pirates of the World Wide Web
Nothing that can stop us now
We are here to stay..."

The day after, I wrote to Mr. Ando.

"Dear Mr. Ando.
What's "Internet" in terms of space?
How do we walk in the Internet, how do we even circulate without dying from boredom? We need you to design the first Internet Pavilion. Not complicate Net-architecture, no "Avatars", "Virtual Worlds", or "Second Life" and the such: all this is exactly what we want to avoid. We need something poetic and influential instead, something suggestive, as suggestive as the engravings of Claude-Nicolas Ledoux.
But Tadao Ando wrote back that he had no time to make the Pavilion. At that point, Jan Aman thought of Mia Hagg and of her boyfriend of those days Jean Nouvel.
I called Mia and we agreed to meet them at Le Fondation Cartier where Nouvel was invited to a dialogue with theorist Paul Virilio. The two were conversing in French and I couldn't understand anything apart of a few words. So I sit back on my armchair and I start writing subtitles in my mind, fantasizing about what Nouvel and Virilio were talking about. I had never read any of Virilio's books, but at some point, - "L'écran du Désert"...

I arrived in the UK on May 20th 2009. Only ten days were left for the opening of the Biennial, I should be doing some last duties in London and depart for Venice. But for some reason, I wouldn't buy my ticket, something inside me was telling me that I should be going somewhere else instead. But where?
As the Internet Pavilion was officially part of the Venice Biennial, the Italian Vogue had arranged an interview and photo-shoot at my studio in HighGate to be included in its traditional Biennial Issue of Uomo Vogue. The interview was conduced by Angela Maria Piga and as I was replying her questions, I had a revelation.
Angela Maria Piga: Paul Vilirio has defined as Dromology the logic of Speed. Such Speed has alternate our perception of time as well as space: in some way, a monk of the Dark Ages, who would wander around the globe in conditions we can't even start imagining, was more conscious of geography and history that what we are today. As for communication, Internet was supposed to bring us closer...

Miltos really had climbed Mount Sinai. He had walked up the mountain. He had climbed it despite his fragile legs (he has a disease which makes his skeleton very brittle). Just as Moses had once climbed Mount Sinai to meet God and from his hand receive the stone tablets with the ten commandments, Miltos had now climbed it too. While Moses climbed, the people of Israel waited in their tents at the foot of the mountain. When Miltos made his way up the mountain, the ground below had been quiet and empty of people. His people were perhaps in Venice.
As Miltos described his journey, things got increasingly lively around us. It was as if the Venice Biennale actually got started as we sat there. People literally dropped in on us at the café: artists, journalists, curators. People we knew or who recognised us. They sat down and began to talk to us about what we were doing or about their own doings during the Biennale. They bought us wine. The conversations continued – conversations that became increasingly intense and increasingly devoid of meaning. Conversations that turned into dinners and parties. And soon enough openings and press conferences. Since the pirates were there, interest focused on them. Which was precisely our calculation. Everything went according to plan.
From "On Miltos, Moses and Marcel" by Jan Aman

Arriving at Sinai it was already late. I asked the taxi driver where I could spend the night and he suggested "The Desert Fox Camp", located at a short walk's distance away from the Monastery of St. Catherine and right at the foot of the Mt. Sinai massif. Managed by Faraj "Fox" Mahmoud, the camp was a magic place and even more, for some reason, I happened to be their only guest!
"We are going to the desert to play some music" Faraj "Fox" Mahmoud, had told me as he was offering me some tea.
"Do you want to join us?"
Looking at him and his friends I could see they were all Beduin men. But there was also a female between them, a British girl, the wife of Faraj. "Beduin women aren't allowed to going around with men, they spend most of the day at home doing jobs. Because of the internet though, these women are today very well connected and they are actually controlling and managing everything from a distance." she told me .
I decide to join them and a while later, I found myself at a very lonely place in the middle of the desert. I watched the bedouins preparing the necessary for their improvised rave-party. They had with them their traditional shabbabas, a length of metal pipe fashioned into a sort of flute, and their rababas, a versatile, one-string violin. Soon all of these instruments were lying on the desert's floor as the men were installing a few huge speakers on the top of their Hyundai cars. Before start playing though, they produced their smartphones- they all had very contemporary smartphones supplied with strong internet connection.
"Network is not a problem, we have very good connection here in the desert" they told me, "A strong connection is necessary to share this moment with our people at home".
They start playing and singing and at the same time, they would Skype with their relatives and friends in Nuweiba. Their friends and relatives from the village, were Skyping back to us sounds and songs which my new friends would amplify through microphones they had brought with them for that purpose and send them to the speakers they had installed on the top of their cars. A long-distance connected improvisation was taking part in the desert, music arriving from everywhere, a mystical "Other Network" was established! Filled with amazement, I was paying no attention to the food that they offered to me and I consumed a large quantity of their bread. As I happened to be in a strict no-gluten diet for my Crohn's disease, I wake up the next day with a very strong fever.


"Can you please bring me to San Catherine?" I asked the Beduins. I knew that at this old Greek Orthodox monastery, build sometime around 548, there was a guesthouse and I figured that it would be a better place to recover than "Desert Fox Camp's" cold rooms made by concrete . I spent the next two days there, shivering and vomiting, with my only company a book I found there. It was a book about Moses and about his quest of pulling his Jew out of Egypt...

I never made it to the top of the mountain.. I was too tired, too exhausted from the fever, too worn out from my quest for an Other Internet Pavilion. I just made it half-way up, in the company of a beduin teenager who actually teached me one or two things to me (but that's a whole other story, the beginning of "Metascreen" that I start realizing only a year later).
I never met a God and never brought to the Venice Biennial the peculiar internet that Dr. Kleinrock was dreaming when he was a teenager himself.
I had fled from Egypt to Italy with empty hands, went straight to Fondamenta delle Zattere, straight to the Magazzini del Sale. The Pirates from the PirateBay.org were all there and sure enough, they had put on the "Embassy of Piracy" already!
Every morning, the anarchists of "Magazzini", would share their boats with them and they would go around all of them armed with Pirate flags, singing the beautiful "Pirates of the Internet" song, fighting copyright and intellectual property in front of a completely uninterested art crowd.
The artists that I had invited, were there too, they had installed their beamers and they were projecting their websites in a- somewhat pathetic but sweet- improvised installation that I believe inspired Rafael Rozendaal's BYOB (Bring Your Own Beamer) future operations.
Nothing of all that looked particularly good- it wasn't the Internet Pavilion I was dreaming. But I was too weak to argue with the artists and to try to convince them to turn off their projectors and trust the internet instead...
In the middle of Magazzini stood the skeleton of "PAGES", the Internet Space-turned-into-Place that Christian Wassmann had promised. It didn't looked good, somewhere in the conversion, Wassmann's beautiful idea had lost its proportion and its magic and had become just another furniture.
It wasn't Christian's fault though, it was simply the way things are in a world dominated by gravity..
I don't think that Le Corbusier's Phillips Pavilion looked that great in real either. What's important, is keep searching for what Wassmann calls "Excess Material", stuff that nobody is trying to create, nobody thinks is necessary, still it exists!
At my very last day in Venice, after a photo-shoot at Magazzini for While Dazed & Confussed, while Dazed's photographer Matthew Stone was packing away his cameras, I watched as Rafael Rozendaal was jumping to the dirty waters of the Giudecca. For a second, I saw him suspended over the edge of the water, a temporary human sculpture, the final artwork that was produced by the First Internet Pavilion. Matthew Stone-the photographer- also turned to look and as he turned, fired the trigger of his camera: a snapshot of the moment was frozen onto the wall of Digital-a reminder that gravity can be avoided.
From "On Miltos, Moses and Marcel" by Jan Aman

Miltos Manetas is sometimes regarded as a painter. But he’s no ordinary painter. He’s a painter in the same way that Andy Warhol was, beginning by distancing himself from painting as a form of expression. From "On Miltos, Moses and Marcel" by Jan Aman
(Partly written in Swedish and translated by Tomas Tranaeus, partly written in English and overviewed by Tomas Tranaeus.)